AOL has officially switched over their search results and ads to Bing search results with Bing Ads advertising as of January 1, 2016. The deal, which was officially announced back in June 2015, is expected to increase the reach of both their search and their paid ads.
There are geographic limits to the change, which Bing Ads details in their own blog post.
Bing now powers AOL’s web, mobile, and tablet search, providing paid search ads and algorithmic organic search results to AOL’s properties worldwide, and exclusively in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
While the search results are primarily the same as what you see on Bing, AOL doesn’t seem to be using some of the same search result features, such as expanded sitelinks. There is also not an option to view cache and the URLs are listed as exact URLs instead of the breadcrumb style we often see now.
They do have a new “Powered by Bing” addition to the AOL footer on their search results.
AOL still does have a 1% market share, according to comScore search rankings. While that 1% isn’t as significant to Google, to Bing – with only a 20.9% share – this is pretty significant. And it is also another avenue for Bing Ads advertisers to increase the impressions on their ads.
It also means that Bing is responsible for serving the search results for both Yahoo and AOL, which are #3 and #5 on the comScore market share list.
Our partnership with AOL brings additional scale and opportunity to advertisers and marketers. Today, 1 in 5 searches happen on Bing.com, and by providing Bing search results for the number 3 (Yahoo) and 5 (AOL) search providers in the US, Bing powers close to one-third of US PC web searches.1 Today’s announcement is testament to Microsoft’s ongoing focus on search and search advertising and our increasing scale that connects a marketer’s media buys to new publishers and audiences to help them achieve more impact for their business.
Bing Ads also released a blog post detailing the AOL change for their advertisers and what changes they have made to better support the new AOL deal.
With this partnership, we are rolling out several changes inside Bing Ads, including the Campaigns page, Reporting page, Google AdWords Import experience, and Keyword and Campaign Planners.
This will be interesting to see what kind of impact this has. Bing Ads advertisers should be especially happy, since ad inventory availability is one thing advertisers would like to see improved and the additional 1% of overall market share should really help. And this is also good since Yahoo has pulled back on their own use of Bing search results and Bing Ads, although they are still contractually bound to serve Bing 51% of the time.
Jennifer Slegg
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